[fpc-devel] Announcement: Free Pascal CompilerDelphi XEPortProject (type override idea)

[Matt Emson]

On 14/04/2011 15:10, Skybuck Flying wrote:
>>
>>> Anyway if somebody could take a look at all of this and make some 
>>> sense of it that would be great/nice, saves me some time and could 
>>> clear some confusion (?) ;)
>>
>> Before looking at your code, I'd know the role that your project 
>> plays at all. Is it only about making the FPC code compilable by 
>> Delphi, as the first stage in the FPC bootstrap?
> Skybuck Flying schrieb:
>
> Yes.
>
> Plan is as follows:

<snip>

> 2. Once free pascal compiler is compiled towards an executable by 
> Delphi it should then be possible to compile Free Pascal's own RTL 
> with Free Pascal.


Why? Free Pascal already compiles its own RTL - why do you need to do 
this? What advantage would there be in tying FreePascal to a Windows 
only compiler, when it is already cross platform - the RTL already 
compiling on multiple platforms?


> An alternative idea could be to start working on compiling the Free 
> Pascal RTL with Delphi as well.

Why? What advantage would this have? The FreePascal RTL is not radically 
different from Delphi in many ways, so what advantage would this give? 
And we are not talking about GUI here at all - we are talking about 
fundamental types and such. GUI is a completely different subject, as 
the toolkits API would be built with the basic building blocks for each 
target.


> 3. Once the RTL is compiled use the original RTL sources and/or RTL 
> binaries to recompile the free pascal compiler so it's fully 
> self-hosting and self-compiling.

???? It already is. Am I missing something here?

>> legacy FPC. You also could try to make the FPC sources compile by gcc -
>
> The whole idea is to not require FPC to do any development, all 
> development done on/in Delphi IDE and then final stage compile with 
> FPC for non-supported-delphi-platforms.

There was a Delphi IDE plug-in that did this - would that just not be, 
you know, simpler?

> GNU Compilers are slow, furthermore they are not object-oriented as 
> far as I know/last time I checked so they totally out-of-the-question.

What does that have to do with anything? The compiler being OO has 
nothing to do with the capability of the compiler to compile OO code.

Honestly, even the explanation isn't making what you are trying to do 
make any more sense than it did before you started. So, can you please 
explain exactly what you are doing - without digressing and assuming we 
already understand? Because, really, I don't think we really do - at 
least not all of us ;-)